How is it that as a society, we have grown so accustomed and seemingly desensitized to atrocities happening to sex workers? Sex workers are raped, robbed or murdered and most of the community looks the other way.

A new investigative piece in The Chicago Reporter illustrates what community groups and academics have long observed, that anti-prostitution laws cause tremendous harm to people engaged in the sex trade, especially those who are LGBT.

Law enforcement, human trafficking survivors, advocates, and prosecutors have all come together to put Proposition 35 on the ballot. We are fighting for the women and girls who are born, raised, and trafficked in our neighborhoods and communities. This is nothing short of modern-day slavery.

Far too often, the exploitation that is occurring is a result of social and structural conditions that we've created as a society. Collapsing choice, circumstance, and coercion into one category of sex work or trafficking erodes the nuances that explain people's engagement with sex for money.

Human Rights Watch found incidents of condom-related harassment of suspected sex workers by police in six of D.C.'s seven police districts. Several women, including transgender sex workers, say they were stopped and searched by police, who accused them of prostitution upon finding condoms.

As states distribute free condoms to promote public health while arresting those suspected of engaging in sex work for possessing them, they waste resources and muddle public messaging about the necessity of practicing safe sex.

Three years ago, Munayie, 25, made her living as a commercial sex worker. She wanted to do something else but sex work was the only thing she knew that brought in the money she needed to provide for herself and her 8-year-old son.

Discriminatory state action like the forced HIV testing of sex workers drives further underground some of the people most in need of public health services that facilitate HIV prevention. It also alienates groups, like sex workers, who make fantastic peer educators on HIV.

I wrote a post last week about the reality of being a sex worker in a relationship, explaining that it's sometimes good, sometimes hard, often complicated. Well, I have intimate experience with one of the greatest media-fed taboos in sex-worker romances: I fell in love with a client once.

The media says that if you are a person in the sex industry, even one who consensually entered sex work, you will always have to make a choice between love and work. Sex workers, you see, cannot afford to love. I say that's crap.

It's ironic that in a society where everybody is looking for a hand out these women are simply fighting for the chance to work. Sex workers are everywhere, folks. There is a reason that prostitution is the oldest profession in the world.